Field deployment — aquaculture LoRaWAN install, 2024.

LoRaWAN marketing material is unreasonably optimistic. “10 miles in open rural areas.” “10-year battery life.” “Multiple concurrent sensors.” All technically true under laboratory conditions. Almost never true in the field.

This is a short collection of things we’ve learned running LoRaWAN deployments at customer sites — aquaculture ponds, remote ag fields, metal-heavy industrial yards. Filed so that the next person deploying a gateway doesn’t have to re-learn them.

## Range depends on what’s in the way, not what’s on the datasheet

The 10-mile number is a best-case line-of-sight measurement, usually quoted for the US915 band with default spreading factor. What we’ve measured in production:

- **Open farmland, no structures**: ~6–8 miles is realistic for a roof-mounted gateway. Good enough for multi-pond deployments.
- **Wooded or hilly terrain**: 1–3 miles. Foliage eats 2.4 GHz way worse than LoRa’s sub-GHz bands, but hills still block line-of-sight.
- **Industrial sites with steel and concrete**: 200–600 meters in practice. The “urban” 1.5-mile spec assumes a much more favourable mix of buildings than a yard full of stacked shipping containers.

Plan your gateway count based on the worst-case terrain in your footprint, not the datasheet average.

## Sensor nodes, realistically

The typical [deployment we ship](/content/hardware/index.html):

- **Multi-parameter probe node** with RS485 input — in aquaculture, this is pH, dissolved oxygen, and electrical conductivity feeding one node. Sampled every 5–15 minutes. Running off 2 × 3.6V AA lithium cells, we see 2–3 years in practice, not the spec-sheet decade.
- **Ultrasonic level sensor** — pond water level or tank fill. Solid for non-contact measurement in water that would destroy a float sensor.
- **Industrial cellular router** with dual SIM and PoE for the gateway backhaul and any PoE cameras on the same pole.
- **LoRa concentrator gateway** — we typically reach for the [ILH-85](/content/hardware/ilh-85/index.html) for any deployment over a few hundred devices or needing 10+ km of coverage.

The bottleneck on battery life is almost always the sample interval and the payload size. Sending 40 bytes every 15 minutes is one thing. Sending a 200-byte JSON blob every minute is another.

## Dissolved oxygen is the metric that matters

For aquaculture specifically: if DO drops below ~3 mg/L for fish species we’ve worked with, you have minutes, not hours, before losses. Everything else — pH, temperature, EC — is trend data. DO is an incident.

We configure DO with an alert rule that fires aggressively (SMS + email + in-app badge) at 4 mg/L, not 3. The extra margin is worth the occasional false page.

## Cameras solve different problems than sensors

Sites with fish, equipment, or anything theft-prone end up wanting cameras on the same pole as the gateway. This seems obvious in retrospect but we’ve seen customers try to run “IoT” deployments without a single camera and then wonder why they can’t tell whether an alert was a real event or a sensor fault.

IP cameras over PoE, backhauled through the same cellular router as the LoRaWAN gateway: it’s a boring, reliable setup. 24/7 recording with snapshot retention is usually enough.

## What we wouldn’t build again

- **WiFi-to-LoRa bridges at a remote site.** The WiFi always falls over and you’ve just added a single point of failure in front of your cellular link.
- **Battery nodes with sub-minute sample intervals.** If you need per-second data, you need wired power. Budget for it upfront.
- **A single gateway “because coverage should reach.”** Always plan for redundancy. Gateways get hit by lightning, by forklifts, by ambient water, by people who decide to “move this box over here.”

* * *

If you’re planning a LoRaWAN deployment and want a sanity-check on the design, we’re happy to look at the site plan. It’s usually cheaper than discovering the coverage gap after the hardware is screwed down.